


Zero to Sixty

by 4TSloid



Category: Metal Gear
Genre: Dreams and Nightmares, Flashbacks, M/M, Marijuana, Tattoos, Vaginal Fingering, exposition via sex scene, sam gets stoned
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-12
Updated: 2020-11-13
Packaged: 2021-03-09 19:35:17
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 4,919
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27521629
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/4TSloid/pseuds/4TSloid
Summary: “Oh, Pretty Boy,” Sam shakes his head, “Ice Princess, will you never let me in?” He presses his lips into the side of Jack’s neck. “Your knight in shining armour is still waiting.”“Yeah, sure,” Jack mutters, “‘knight in shining armour’. Fuck you.”Cleanup from One Way.
Relationships: Raiden/Samuel Rodrigues
Comments: 1
Kudos: 29





	1. the measure of all things

Jack’s hand feathers down Sam’s back, past the wrought metal and myriad scratches fresh and old. It comes to rest at an old tattoo, depicting the outline of a koi fish, its tail wrapped around a bullet wound. “When did you get this,” Jack asks, voice raspy.

Sam kisses him chastely, smiles against his lips. “You mean the scar or the ink?”

“The tattoo.”

“I got it in New York.”

Jack sits up, eyes like saucers. “New York City.”

“Yes, sir.”

“When was this.”

“2009,” Sam guesses, “early 2009.” He sits up with Jack and pushes the sheets off. It was getting a little toasty under there anyways.

“You weren’t there for April thirtieth, were you?”

“I would’ve been headed for Venezuela again by then. What happened?”

“It was my fault.”

Sam smirks. “I have no idea what you are talking about.”

He watches Jack sigh and run a hand through his hair. “Only an entire autonomous Metal Gear-manufacturing arsenal crashing into Manhattan. And then I had to swordfight the president.”

“So it’s happened before?”

“And I had like three existential crises at once that day,” Jack’s voice is deadpan. “I thought Armstrong was just running for president.”

“I know, I know.” One of Jack’s hands falls atop Sam’s thigh like it was magnetic. “So if you were in Manhattan at that time, and  _ I  _ was  _ also _ in Manhattan then,” Sam puts his left hand atop Jack’s, “perhaps fate decided it wasn’t the right time for us to meet.”

“Thank god for that. I got engaged to Rose, like, the next day.”

“We could’ve walked past each other on the street and not even known,” Sam says. “Wait, let me rephrase that.  _ You _ could have walked right past me on the street.  _ I  _ would have probably stopped and ogled your ass for a while.”

“Hold on.” Jack stands up and heads around the bed to the closet, allowing Sam to ogle his ass for a while. There’s light coming in from through the sliding glass door to the balcony that makes Jack look like an angel that stepped out of some Renaissance painting. He squats down to rummage through some shoe boxes that Sam knew didn’t contain shoes, and after a moment, produces a bodysuit with light armour on the shoulders and slots around the waist to put utility pouches. It must be skin tight. “This is what I wore that day.”

Sam’s eyebrows raise. “Put it on?” 

“Claws,” Jack glances at his feet, “I’d rip it to pieces. And sometimes I’m tempted to. It’s got some sort of nanomachine integration capabilities, too. You’d need flesh and blood for it to work.”

“You have any pictures of you wearing it?”

Jack tosses the suit in a pile on the floor. It sounds heavier than Sam anticipated. “More jerk off material, huh,” he remarks, then pulls a shoe box out from the closet. He sits and dumps its contents out on the shag rug. The light reflects off his back and makes everything look all overexposed and sunny. The bed squeaks as Sam makes his way down to join him.

Jack’s not in every photo in the box. Most of the pictures are water damaged, crumpled, scratched, the corners dinged. He slaps his hand down on a picture involving a greying man with an eyepatch before Sam can get a closer look. The photo Jack hands him is from the waist up, but he seems like an afterthought compared to the two other figures in the picture. It’s David and Hal, each of them with an arm around the other’s waist. There’s a little green bird on Hal’s shoulder. All of them are smiling, but Jack’s looks more like a cringe. “You gonna whip your dick out to this? Just get it over with if you are.”

“Oh, no. Just curious.” Jack purses his lips. Sam helps him put all the photos back in the box, but Jack keeps his hand over the man in the eyepatch. 

The two end up in bed again. Jack rubs his thumb against a vein running up Sam’s flesh arm. Sam finds himself taking in Jack’s baby blue dreamboat eyes, somewhere behind his beach blond, boy band bangs. “Actually, when I jerk off, I’d much rather think about Armstrong or Sundowner fucking you.”

Jack blows a tuft of his bangs off his forehead. “Did I ask?” 

“You brought it up.”

“It’s so you can swoop in and rescue me from them.”

Sam pulls his arm away and smugly slips a finger between Jack’s legs. “It’s so I can show them how to properly fill and fuck a beautiful princess that deserves such delicate handling,” Sam muses, “and not just pounding until you cum inside.” The princess gives him a dreamy sigh, but pushes Sam’s face away with the heel of his hand. 

“Speak for yourself.”

“I  _ am _ your knight in shining armour, after all.”

The heel of Jack’s hand turns into claws. “You’re not my nothing.” He kisses the hinge of Sam’s jaw.

“We’re fuck buddies,” Sam says, like it’s the most obvious thing in the world. He inches his fingers closer to Jack’s hole. Jack opens his mouth for a retort, but closes it. “What? We have sex. We’re doing it right now.”

“Yeah.”

“And we  _ are _ friends, no?”

Jack clears his throat. “Jury’s still out on that one.”

“Oh, Pretty Boy,” Sam shakes his head, “Ice Princess, will you never let me in?” He presses his lips into the side of Jack’s neck. “Your knight in shining armour is still waiting.”

“Yeah, sure,” Jack mutters, “‘knight in shining armour’. Fuck you.” He tries to fuck himself on those intruding fingers, but Sam pulls back, favouring the clit instead.

Perhaps the exact definition of Sam and Jack’s relation to each other was a little blurred after those days not long past. Sam blissfully recalls fucking Jack for hours and hours at a time in that hotel room in SoCal, stopping only because the sounds of his empty stomach growling overpowered Jack’s beautiful moaning. Then they clinked together glasses of orange juice at the continental breakfast, and Jack said  _ let’s go to the beach? _ and Sam said  _ but you have no swimsuit, you said so yourself. _ And then the two are in a changing room at the store, Sam silently sucking on each of Jack’s folds while a brand new pair of (very brief) swim trunks dangles off one of his clawed feet.  _ Do you have any idea _ , Jack would tell him, while the surf surrounded their ankles and their toes swam in the sand,  _ how hard it is to find clothes that fit you when you have a twenty-five inch waist and ass cheeks the size of your head _ . He’s pulled out a mile of the drawstring and tied it in a bow like a present. Sam’s flesh hand lands on the teeny bit of the exposed underside of Jack’s buttock.  _ Well _ , he said,  _ I’d reckon I fit you just fine _ . 

“What if I tried on that suit of yours,” Sam proposes, an orgasm later.

“What suit?”

“The one you showed me, literally minutes ago.”

“Are you crazy,” Jack says.

“Everybody’s born crazy. The problem is, keeping it--”

“You’ve told me that before.”

Sam doesn’t speak any more on the topic. Jack technically didn’t refuse, so it’s fair game in Sam’s book. “I had the date my father was killed stick-and-poked into my right wrist, too,” he says, raising his metal hand to examine where the marks would have been, “but we all know what happened to that.”

“Was that before or after you went to Japan?”

“Right after my old man was lowered into the ground.” Sam wraps his flesh hand around the joint of his other wrist. “I wore a watch over it the whole time I was in Japan. It was so that I would remember him every time I drew a sword. Like he was watching me, judging me.” Sam smacks his lips. “I wish I’d never got it.”

Jack’s whisper is directly into his ear. “Armstrong took care of that for you.”

“Maybe he did.” Sam shrugs Jack’s chin off his shoulder. His hands cling to Sam’s trapezii. “Anyways, Blondie, I’m going to head out for the afternoon.” It’s almost one o’clock. It’s been years since Sam felt no guilt for sleeping in so late. He wipes the sleep out of his eyes and searches for his underwear.


	2. it is written

Sam comes home with groceries and a little more, like usual. He hopes Jack doesn’t notice the sound of crinkling plastic as he swings a bag up on the counter and produces a cassava. Jack furrows his brow at it. “... on Earth is that fruit… vegetable, root… thing?”

“I’m going to try to make my own tapioca flour with it. Key word here is  _ try _ .” Sam gives it a pat.

“Yeah, that’s great, but I still don’t know what it is.”

“Don’t know a cassava when you see one?”

“Apparently not.”

Sam readies the next ingredient from his bag of tricks. “You’ll know  _ this _ when you see it.” Pulls out a long Chinese eggplant and whips it on the counter in front of his crotch, quirking an eyebrow. 

Jack’s nostrils flare as he steps toward the butcher’s block. He takes an eighteen-inch knife out and stabs it into the eggplant.

“Oh,” Sam says, trying not to justify Jack’s action with a reaction. He grips the back of his collar and tugs his shirt off. “One more thing.” Taped over the inside of his left pectoral is a covering for a fresh tattoo. 

Jack’s eyes go wide. To an outsider, he might seem seething mad upon peeling back the little plastic cover and seeing the two very familiar kanji inked into Sam’s flesh, but Sam knows that he forgets to speak through clenched teeth when something’s actually at stake. “This--” Jack stammers, “th-this is my  _ fucking _ name.” Sam is as smug as ever. “You know what happens to cutesy couples who get their names tattooed on each other?”

“I thought we were fuck buddies. I thought we went over this.”

“They  _ break up _ , Sam. They break up and then they have this fucker’s name written on their ass or something, and they have to explain about their past relationships and shit.”

Sam glances down at his chest. “Well, if I get another lover, I could just tell them it means  _ hope _ or  _ fortitude _ or something else white people get tattooed on them.” He’s hardly finished his sentence before one of Jack’s hands flies in the direction of his jaw. Sam sidesteps it.

“What if they can read Japanese?”

“Then they’re a weeaboo, and that’s not my problem.”

“What if they literally  _ are _ Japanese?” All of Jack’s blows are aimed for Sam’s head, and the both of them know it. He’s just joking around.

Smoothing over the wrap on his chest, Sam says, “Then are they  _ literally _ going to think that I was fucking the  _ literal _ Japanese god of thunder?” Jack’s fists unclench, but that tension returns in the crease of his brow. “Don’t make that face,  _ bonito _ , you are going to get ugly wrinkles and such.”

Jack swallows, and takes a breath through his teeth. “You’re going to regret it when we break up.”

“So this is a matter of  _ when _ , and not  _ if _ ?”

“Come on, Sam,” Jack takes a step away, looks at Sam through the one-way mirror in the dining room. “We used to want to kill each other and now we’re just fucking. I learned you were still alive, like, what, two weeks ago. Look at this realistically.”

Sam shakes his head. “You’re the one not being realistic.  _ You _ think we are just fucking. If I felt the same way, I wouldn’t have this.” He taps the covering on his tattoo.

“Okay, then,” Jack lowers his hands. He takes a second. “I believe you. I don’t doubt that you’ve got those…” makes some ambiguous hand gestures, “feelings for me.”

“I love you.” Sam says, in case it wasn’t articulated clearly enough.

Jack takes a closer look at Sam’s face in the mirror. There’s no stupid smirk. His guard is completely down. “I really don’t doubt that,” Jack repeats. “But you know you shouldn’t.” He watches Sam step closer and closer to bury his face in the nape of Jack’s neck. As if it would change Jack’s mind about anything.

“Why not?” Sam dares to ask, when he surfaces for air.

“Do I need to spell it out for you.” Jack whispers, as his hand finds its way around Sam’s jaw.

“Let me guess. The very nature of our role as warriors.”

“You never know if today’s going to be the last day you’ll spend with,  _ hah _ \--” Sam starts rubbing circles into the top vertebrae of his spine. “--don’t know when you’ll have to leave.”

“So, you see, your concerns are stupid; there’s a very simple solution,” Sam whispers right into Jack’s ear, “I just have to make love to you every night like it’s the last time I’ll ever see you.”

A fist pistons right into Sam’s stomach. His feet leave the floor, he’s staring at the ground, then the ceiling as Jack tosses him over his shoulder. He’s hit the ground so hard that the tableware rattles in the cabinets nearby on impact. Sam laughs. “Let me make this clear to you,” Jack says, like he’s giving new recruits an outline of expectations at boot camp. “Because it’s obviously not getting through your skull. I don’t want to love you. I don’t want to  _ fall _ in love with you,” he steps over Sam’s legs and leaves his field of view. “Because the more people I love, the more people I have to worry about losing.”

After taking inventory of any injuries-- some bruising and a sore tailbone-- Sam gets to his feet. “And yet here we are.” That smirk returns.

Jack’s found his way to the couch, to sit himself down and force himself to relax. “That’s a pretty big leap in logic, Rodrigues.”

“You’re calling me names, belittling me, fighting me and arguing with me constantly,” Sam lists, “betraying my boundaries-- remember the handcuffs, that first time, and Murasama-- and generally being a horrible dee-bag to me in order to not only prevent  _ me _ from falling in love-- which, by the way, didn’t work, but--”

Sam’s cut himself off. There’s no response from Jack, whose mouth is halfway open.

“-- But to also convince yourself.” Sam hopes Jack can fill in the blanks from there. “Convince yourself that you don’t--”

“-- I love you,” Jack interrupts him now. “There. I said it.”

Now, this isn’t exactly the scenario Sam had in mind where his Pretty Boy first confessed his undying love. But something is better than nothing. “Jack, are you ever like this with Rosita?”

“Sam, it’s different with you. I know you can take whatever I say or do to you.” Jack’s got his knees tucked up in front of him on the couch, now, all compressed like a spring. He throws his head back. “You’re ridiculous. Tell me you got a whole bunch of tattoos from your other past relationships after two fucking weeks.”

Sam scoffs. “You’ve seen every inch of me, Pretty Boy. Besides, this new one will be all covered up with hair again in a few weeks again, ehn?”

Jack’s glance flicks from deadpan at Sam’s face to idly at the mirror in the dining room again, where his ass was surely to be seen at his angle. “Oh, fuck it, I don’t know anymore.” He stands. He’s probably going down to the training room to beat the stuffing out of something now. Make that some _ one _ , then, whether Jack is ready to make out with Sam or deck him in the face, Sam is ready to give it all of it back to him and more. So Sam follows. 


	3. to put it bluntly

After a nice, long bout of unarmed combat with the man Sam might call his lover, he heads to the kitchen. Dinner is a rack of ribs Sam got on sale last month and had been sitting in the freezer ever since, with a side of hash browns and eggplant medallions. There was one more little surprise in store for them, though, and Jack watched in horror as Sam lit one end of it and put the other in his mouth, blowing out an obnoxious-smelling puff of smoke.  _ I don’t care what it is you’re smoking _ , Jack had said,  _ I didn’t let Dave smoke in the house and I’m not gonna let you smoke in the house _ . He dragged Sam to the bedroom and shoved him out on the balcony. But it was too late. Sam was already halfway through an absolutely riveting story, and Jack just  _ had _ to listen to him ramble on while he tried to get drunk.

“--So I lean in real close to him, Pretty Boy, and I ask him, ‘do you know what the  _ real _ difference between you and me is?’ What is it, Jack. Tell me you know.”

“No,” Jack replies, nursing his second beer of the night. “Enlighten me.”

“I tell him, ‘the difference between you and me is that’,” and Sam leans in Jack’s direction now, as if to demonstrate, “‘I’ll let your girl peg me’.” Jack stands up to shove him away. He throws his head back and laughs and takes a drag and exhales a fistful of smoke.

Jack sits forwards a little on the bed, and gets this devious kind of look on his face. “Are you tryna’ tell me something, Rodrigues?”

“I’m just telling you this story,  _ meu amor _ . So anyways, I pull up next to him at a stoplight after I drop her off at home, and he’s in his big shiny Beemer and I’m in this thousand-dollar POS--”

“You know,” they’re both trying to talk over one another, “there should’ve been a robot dick in that box Genevieve and Doktor gave me.”

“-- like this hunter green, 2001 Toyota Celica,” Sam continues, “starts revving his engine at me. And I’m like, ‘ _ pendelho _ , I’ll kill both of us, unless you wanna pull over and settle this like men, which in that case, only one of us is dying. And it ain’t me, so,” another paroxysm of laughter. “I’m sorry,  _ bonito _ , you were saying.”

“Did you kill him?” Jack asks.

A beat. “Weeeell,” Sam draws out the word and it turns into another giggle. “I certainly didn’t check to see if he was still alive. So…” His laughter is silent now, a printer cartridge run out of ink. Sam puts the blunt to his lips again. 

It’s starting to get cold. “I dunno if you heard me.” Jack says.

“Heard what, now.”

“I’m gonna peg you.”

His face stretches into a grin again. “Is that a threat?”

“One of these days. When this dick comes.”

Sam’s squeezing the last few drops of ink out. “What dick? Where?”

“Two to four weeks,” Jack says.

“Ohoho, my days are numbered.”

There’s no immediate response from Jack’s end; he’s taking another sip. “Don’t put it like that.”

“Put it like what, now.”

“That you’re joking about me killing you. Even if it’s jus’ joking,” Jack mutters. “I mean, if I wanted to kill you for real, I would’ve done it a long time ago.”

“Like when I had my dick in you,” Sam’s head flops from one of his shoulders to the other, restless, “or when you were literally choking the life out of me.”

“You would’ve died happy, wouldn’t you’ve?” Jack’s starting to slur. “Horny sunuvabitch.”

Sam’s answer comes from out of left field. “No. That would’ve been a fate worse than death, Pretty Boy, to die knowing that the man you loved unconditionally was planning for days for all the pieces to fall into place and--” He makes the throat-slitting gesture. “--  _ kshhhk. _ You know, like the man who killed my father. He was going for me next, apparently.”

“But you got him first.” Jack fills in the blank. 

Sam nods slowly, but he perks up after a second. “You know what?”

“What.”

“I don’t think that qualifies as pegging,  _ bonito _ . We’re both men. Neither of us is using a strap on, if for all intents and purposes that cyborg cock is like the real thing.”

“Has anyone ever told you you talk way too much?”

Sam’s hearty laugh returns. “It’s the weed,” he says, and tosses the butt of his blunt off the edge of the balcony. Jack doesn’t stop him as he steps back over the threshold and into the bedroom.


	4. mens rea

That night, Sam dreams one of those dreams that makes him remember why he never got any sleep back at Desperado. Except this time he wasn’t watching Yoshiaki kill his father, but it was Jack, fully armoured, and bisected clean through the waist by a high-frequency blade from some faceless goon. He seemed so delicate at that moment. Sam awakens in a cold sweat, smelling faintly of weed, with Jack absent from his side. The divot in the mattress is still fresh, and the sheets are still a little warm from where he lay. It’s still dark out. It’s half past three in the morning. 

Jack’s not in the living room, so he must be in the training room again. Perfect. He punches in the code to surpass the mirror-door and finds Jack sitting on the ground, brooding. “You heard that, didn’t you.”

“Heard what,” Sam asks, “pray tell?”

“Me screaming in my sleep.”

That gets Sam’s attention. “Heavens, no.”

“So I didn’t wake you up.”

“I woke myself up.” Sam picks Murasama up from its spot leaning against the wall, and unsheathes it. “Just to dance with you.” He raises his eyebrows.

Jack rubs his temples, stands, and produces a spare sword from a closet nearby. He normally likes to make the first move, but Sam makes sure he goes on the offensive to wake him up. He aims for Jack’s head once, twice, now. His father was a strong believer in the rule of three; in conditioning your foe into following a pattern, then disrupting that pattern when their sword is in a place it’s used to being in. But Jack knows all about the rule of three, he expects the third hit to fly somewhere else besides his head-- that being his waist. Sam lets him have the read, lets him get cocky, lets him think he’s such a genius for intercepting a fifth and sixth strike to the head. The blows keep coming; it’s Sam’s job to keep Jack guessing as to where the next curveball will land. Sam has to go out of his way to try and land just one hit on the beautiful boy, to reassure himself that Jack wouldn’t just let himself get killed like that. One wrong move and--!

A clean cut manifests right across Jack’s waist, and Sam didn’t even intend for it to land there. Maybe one of them had misjudged the spacing. Both of them freeze-- Jack looks rather pleased, but then, a stain of confusion, and alarm as the wound registers in Sam’s mind’s eye. He drops Murasama and closes the distance between him and Jack, wraps his arms around Jack’s waist like it was the ribbon holding his head to his neck. The occasional sob shakes him. But not for long. Jack takes him by the armpit. “Get up,” he instructs. 

Now, now. Jack’s response sure was a surprise. It takes him back to when he lost spar after spar against other students back at the dojo, _especially_ Yoshiaki. Everything Sam could do, _he_ could do better. No matter with swords, polearms, or fists and feet, Sam’s father, watching from the sidelines, always told him to just _get up_ every time. No use sniveling and complaining about it. Jack guides him out of the training room and back into the bedroom, Sam can tell even with half his hair hanging in his face. He sits on the edge of the bed while Jack uses his shirt to wipe the blood off the both of them.

Jack’s the first to speak. “Dream a weird weed dream?” He asks.

 _Say that five times fast_ , Sam thinks to himself. “You need not concern yourself with it.” Tries to tuck some hair away from his face, behind his ears.

“That’s what everyone says at first,” Jack replies, and gets on his knees. “But when I haven’t slept for six days straight out of fear of my brain conjuring up my son’s entrails outside his abdominal cavity, Sam,” a beat, “I’d give fucking anything for somebody who could relate.”

Sam exhales a shaky breath he didn’t know he was holding. He could laugh. This was the first time his ultra-suave, overconfident, helplessly romantic and hopefully seductive facade had dissolved before Jack. “Alright, alright. I’ll humour you.” His left hand lands on the side of Jack’s face. “Pretty Boy.”

“Hm,” Jack acknowledges, and turns away from Sam’s hand. Jack needs nanopaste more than anything. He’s bleeding all over the shag rug. He presses the shirt to his midsection and rummages around in the bedside table while Sam explains.

“Although it might seem tame compared to yours,” Sam says, as an afterthought.

Jack’s found some nanopaste. “This isn’t a competition,” he tells him, voice low, then sits on the other side of the bed, back to back with Sam.

“Right.” He scoots backwards, to press himself closer to Jack. That’s all he really needed right now. “I had a dream that you died.” He knows Jack won’t press him on it, so he continues. “You were killed in action. We were both in our armour and had our swords, but some nobody,” Sam snaps his fingers. “Like that. Right through the waist.”

The back of Jack’s head shifts against Sam’s. “So that’s why you wanted me to spar. So I wouldn’t get careless.”

“You weren’t,” Sam sighs. “You’re never careless. Least of all when you’re all suited up.”

Jack’s cheek meets Sam’s shoulder. “You wanted to protect me, didn’t you.”

“I want to. But I know I don’t need to.” Sam takes a shaky breath, and finds the gall to ask, “what was yours about.”

Jack smacks his lips. “ _Mens rea_ ,” he breathes. “I had an intent, this time. A motive.” Made it all the more horrifying. He touches Sam’s left forearm. “If I killed them,” with every word his grip gets a little tighter, “If I killed Rose, killed-- John, then… they would be safe, in a twisted sort of way.”

Sam’s mouth is dry. He tries to scootch back on the quilts, to give Jack a better backrest.

“They’d be safe in my memories.” Jack inhales wetly through his nostrils. “And I’d have the final s-say what happened to them. That was my rationale.” 

“You love them, don’t you?”

A shuddering exhalation. “That’s what I tell myself.”

“If you love them, _bonito_ , that should be enough. That’s what separates the monsters from the men.”

“I never feel like it’s enough.”

“Well, Jack,” Sam shifts in his seat to lie face-up on the bedcovers. “You love me. That’s enough in my book.”

Jack slowly, deliberately gets down to Sam’s level, eyes a little damp, to rest his head on his chest. And to rest his hand on Sam’s crotch. “You wanna fuck?--”

Sam swats his hand away. “I just want to know you’re here.” He reaches for his phone on the bedside table. “And besides. I’m compiling a playlist of songs that sound like how having sex with you feels.”

“You’re ridiculous.” Jack squints at Sam and takes the phone from him, wrinkling his nose at Marvin Gaye and The Weeknd. “I expected a little more speed metal on here.” He turns the screen off. “You don’t jump at the chance to bone me. God, who are you and what did you do with my Sam.”

Sam tries to laugh. When the moment dies down, he speaks up again. “You know, _belo_ , I was a shy kid growing up.”

“You’d have me fooled.” Jack’s talking into Sam’s neck, stroking the hairless patch of his chest where that accursed tattoo lay.

“I think I read somewhere that people develop different personalities depending on what language they’re speaking.”

“Does that mean you’re less horny and less of an asshole in Portugese?”

“Maybe so. But you’d have to speak to me in Portugese to find out.” Sam turns his head away from Jack, to look out the sliding doors. “I had to learn English when I was eleven, twelve years old. There were kids coming from America to practice at my family’s dojo. And when those Americans see somebody with my skin colour, hear somebody with my accent, they make assumptions.”

Jack shifts to whisper right into Sam’s ear. “I see.” But he wouldn’t really be able to see unless he was Sam. And Sam was similarly certain that there were dimensions to his Ice Princess that would be out of his reach no matter how in love they fell.

“In the morning, Pretty Boy,” Sam turns back to Jack, the two nose-to-nose. The container of nanopaste is on the bed, somewhere by his right knee. “Let’s go watch something at the theatre.”

“Hmm, there’s nothing showing that really interests me.”

“How about we go out for dinner. Taco Tuesday or something.”

“Sure,” Jack says, and they leave it at that. Sam’s sleep is dreamless afterwards.


End file.
